Viktor Solarik was born in Prague in 1961. He lived in the Smíchov district of the city with his parents (who were both chemists) and his older sister, Helena, who still lives in the family home in Prague. Viktor began elementary school in 1968, right after the Warsaw Pact invasion, which occurred in August of that year. He says that it was apparent that the Communist Party had an ‘arm in every organization,’ including sport activities and youth organizations. After graduating from high school, Viktor attended ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) where he studied architecture. An avid windsurfer, he asked permission to travel to Malta to represent Czechoslovakia in a global competition, but the dean of architecture refused to sign for him. Shortly after graduating from ČVUT, Viktor married his wife, Eva, whom he had known since high school, and they decided to emigrate. Viktor says that the pair had the full support of their families who, even though there was a chance they would encounter repercussions, felt fairly secure in their professional lives. They signed up for a tour going to Austria and Germany and, in August 1987, left the country. When the bus stopped in Munich, Viktor and Eva went to the police station where they claimed asylum. After two months in a refugee camp, Viktor found work with a surveyor and the couple were able to move into a small apartment while waiting for their paperwork to clear. They were granted immigration visas to the United States after 18 months and arrived in New York City in March 1989.
Viktor and Eva’s sponsors were friends of their parents who had emigrated in 1968 and lived in New Jersey. They stayed in New Jersey for a few weeks while looking for a job. Viktor was offered a position at the architectural firm Kaeyer, Parker and Garment in Mount Kisco, and the pair moved to Westchester County. In 1998, Viktor started his own firm (VKS Architects) which focuses on residential design and construction. Viktor and Eva have two daughters who are now in college. They both speak Czech and, when they were younger, spent summers with their grandparents and cousins in the Czech Republic. Viktor tries to visit his home country every year to spend time with family and friends. Today he lives in Carmel, New York, with his wife Eva.
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Viktor Solarik was born in Prague in 1961. He lived in the Smíchov district of the city with his parents (who were both chemists) and his older sister, Helena, who still lives in the family home in Prague. Viktor began elementary school in 1968, right after the Warsaw Pact invasion, which occurred in August of that year. He says that it was apparent that the Communist Party had an ‘arm in every organization,’ including sport activities and youth organizations. After graduating from high school, Viktor attended ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) where he studied architecture. An avid windsurfer, he asked permission to travel to Malta to represent Czechoslovakia in a global competition, but the dean of architecture refused to sign for him. Shortly after graduating from ČVUT, Viktor married his wife, Eva, whom he had known since high school, and they decided to emigrate. Viktor says that the pair had the full support of their families who, even though there was a chance they would encounter repercussions, felt fairly secure in their professional lives. They signed up for a tour going to Austria and Germany and, in August 1987, left the country. When the bus stopped in Munich, Viktor and Eva went to the police station where they claimed asylum. After two months in a refugee camp, Viktor found work with a surveyor and the couple were able to move into a small apartment while waiting for their paperwork to clear. They were granted immigration visas to the United States after 18 months and arrived in New York City in March 1989.
Viktor and Eva’s sponsors were friends of their parents who had emigrated in 1968 and lived in New Jersey. They stayed in New Jersey for a few weeks while looking for a job. Viktor was offered a position at the architectural firm Kaeyer, Parker and Garment in Mount Kisco, and the pair moved to Westchester County. In 1998, Viktor started his own firm (VKS Architects) which focuses on residential design and construction. Viktor and Eva have two daughters who are now in college. They both speak Czech and, when they were younger, spent summers with their grandparents and cousins in the Czech Republic. Viktor tries to visit his home country every year to spend time with family and friends. Today he lives in Carmel, New York, with his wife Eva.
“I guess, as a kid, one doesn’t necessarily see all of the suppressiveness of the regime, but one example I can give you is that in 1968, when I was about to go to first grade, of course in August 1968, the Russians and the Warsaw Pact army marched in and it was obviously very stressful. Tanks everywhere, soldiers everywhere, nobody knew what was happening. My father, with a stoic calm, told me ‘Well, I went to school when the Nazis were here and so you go to school when there’s another occupation. So just keep your mouth [shut], don’t tell anybody what we talk about at home, don’t make any contacts with people that you don’t know, and be very careful.’ For a seven-year old kid, that’s kind of a harsh lesson to learn.”
“That was one thing I can tell you about the presence of the regime, or the omnipresence of the regime. As an athlete, I wanted to go to the Academic World Championship in windsurfing in Malta in the Mediterranean. I think it was probably the early ‘80s, ’83 or ’84. So I went to the dean of the faculty and I asked him to sign my paper so I could travel abroad to represent the socialist Czechoslovakia in the Academic World Championship, which I thought was great for the country – and of course I would have enjoyed it very much. And he wouldn’t sign the paper. He thought that it was not appropriate for me to travel abroad. One thing I remember that he said [was] ‘Well, do you want to be an architect or do you want to be an athlete?’ but I saw it as curbing my freedom to decide what I wanted to be. Why was it his decision to decide what I wanted to be? And I could have been either, I guess, or both. But who was he to tell me what I wanted to be? But he didn’t give me the opportunity to do that.”
“We experienced Chernobyl in 1985 and we didn’t know about it for I don’t know how many days after it happened; after the press was forced to admit that something happened. They were denying [it]. Of course, it was all over the world, everybody was talking about it. If you listened to Radio Free Europe or any other station from abroad, it was discussed or talked about it, and the official line was nothing happened. When you find out things like that, how do you feel about living in a state that is hiding such important facts from you and expects you to just accept it on face value?”
How did you experience Chernobyl?
“I think it was late spring in 1985 and I was in a windsurfing camp, because I was on the official Czechoslovak national team, and we were at a lake in western Bohemia – Nechranice, near Chomutov – and so we were practicing and surfing and having a good time, actually. It was beautiful weather; it was clear days and very nice weather, and then we heard this rumor about the nuclear disaster, but nobody could verify anything, so I don’t know how much radiation we received or not. When we came back to Prague, and of course rumors spread very quickly, we found out that this horrible thing happened and there was a discussion about prevailing winds and which way they blew, and whether it was north across Poland and Sweden and back down to Czechoslovakia, or how much radiation was possibly in the air. Nobody knew anything. There was no testing to be checked. It was very upsetting. You feel like you’re being nuked and you don’t even know about it.”
“They encouraged us. We told them that we were planning on leaving and we asked them sort of for their approval. We asked them how they felt it was going to affect their lives, because they’ll be staying behind. In my case, I was also concerned for my sister who had a job. She was young and starting out in her position and the concern was that if she had a brother who emigrated, it would have an effect on her ability to get jobs or work where she was working. But she felt that she had a good enough position to stay where she was and her work would not be greatly affected. My parents didn’t feel that that would affect them tremendously. My wife had the same discussion with her parents. Of course they said how sorely they would miss her, and both of us, but they would certainly encourage us to seek a better life elsewhere.”
“In the early ‘80s, Solidarity in Poland was gaining a lot of interest and was becoming well-known as an opposition, but it seemed to be moving in small steps. Then, in ’85, I went to the Soviet Union and Gorbachev was then president, and there were some signs of glasnost, they called it, and certain liberties that were allowed to people much more than the Stalinist tight regime allowed before. It felt like it might loosen up a little bit, but it never felt like the whole thing is going to collapse. Of course by the time in East Germany when the Berlin Wall came down, we were already here and we were watching it in disbelief. It was something we could never envision or imagine. We were in Berlin not long before that, before we escaped, and you couldn’t even get close to the wall on the Eastern German side. There were police everywhere; there was no-man’s land, all these barbed wires. Everything was so well protected that one could never imagine that it could come down so fast. Unbelievable.”
“Here, everybody has an immigrant story. Everybody’s grandmother or grandfather or great-great-grandparents came from some place, and so everybody relates to the immigration story. I think the story can be told a million times and every time it’s slightly different, but every time it’s the story of people coming here, looking for new life, and then making it better for themselves. I think on a certain level it makes this country better because people have the spirit to succeed and do something better and something with their lives.”
Tomas Pavlicek was born in Kroměříž, southern Moravia, in 1957. His father, Oldřich, was an electrical engineer while his mother, Jindra, worked as an accountant. Due to his father’s position as the head of a hiking club, Tomas spent many weekends traveling around Czechoslovakia. He was active in sports and particularly excelled at skiing and orienteering. Tomas says he first got a taste of Western society when he competed at the orienteering world championships in Finland as part of the Czechoslovak national team. He attended a technical high school in Olomouc, and then studied technical cybernetics at Brno University of Technology. In his first job as an ultrasound technician, Tomas occasionally traveled to the Netherlands, where he worked for Toshiba Medical Systems of Europe. He says that after several of his of trips there, he was offered to join the Communist Party which he refused. Tomas decided to leave the country when a friend told him that his name had come up at a Party meeting.
In May 1987, Tomas booked tickets on a bus tour across Europe for himself and his six-year-old daughter. Upon arriving in Munich (the group’s destination), Tomas and his daughter left the tour and made their way to the house of an acquaintance. It was there that they were reunited with Tomas’s wife, who had left Czechoslovakia separately to avoid raising suspicion. The family stayed in Munich for five months before arriving in the United States in October 1987. The Pavliceks first settled in New Hampshire where Tomas took an ESL course at the University of New Hampshire while applying for jobs. He first found employment at a hospital as a biomedical engineer, but soon joined a fledgling company that provided software training to businesses. After the fall of communism, Tomas began investigating possible business opportunities in Czechoslovakia. He has since started a successful company importing and selling unique Czech glassware. Tomas is still an avid skier and, for the past several years, has ranked amongst the winners at the annual Bača Cup race held at Blue Knob Ski Resort in Pennsylvania. Tomas’s children both speak fluent Czech and he enjoys cooking traditional Czech meals. He frequently returns to the Czech Republic to visit family and friends and, when he retires, hopes to split his time between the United States, the Czech Republic, and Mexico where he owns a villa. Today, Tomas lives in Vienna, Virginia.
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Tomas Pavlicek was born in Kroměříž, southern Moravia, in 1957. His father, Oldřich, was an electrical engineer while his mother, Jindra, worked as an accountant. Due to his father’s position as the head of a hiking club, Tomas spent many weekends traveling around Czechoslovakia. He was active in sports and particularly excelled at skiing and orienteering. Tomas says he first got a taste of Western society when he competed at the orienteering world championships in Finland as part of the Czechoslovak national team. He attended a technical high school in Olomouc, and then studied technical cybernetics at Brno University of Technology. In his first job as an ultrasound technician, Tomas occasionally traveled to the Netherlands, where he worked for Toshiba Medical Systems of Europe. He says that after several of his of trips there, he was offered to join the Communist Party which he refused. Tomas decided to leave the country when a friend told him that his name had come up at a Party meeting.
In May 1987, Tomas booked tickets on a bus tour across Europe for himself and his six-year-old daughter. Upon arriving in Munich (the group’s destination), Tomas and his daughter left the tour and made their way to the house of an acquaintance. It was there that they were reunited with Tomas’s wife, who had left Czechoslovakia separately to avoid raising suspicion. The family stayed in Munich for five months before arriving in the United States in October 1987. The Pavliceks first settled in New Hampshire where Tomas took an ESL course at the University of New Hampshire while applying for jobs. He first found employment at a hospital as a biomedical engineer, but soon joined a fledgling company that provided software training to businesses. After the fall of communism, Tomas began investigating possible business opportunities in Czechoslovakia. He has since started a successful company importing and selling unique Czech glassware. Tomas is still an avid skier and, for the past several years, has ranked amongst the winners at the annual Bača Cup race held at Blue Knob Ski Resort in Pennsylvania. Tomas’s children both speak fluent Czech and he enjoys cooking traditional Czech meals. He frequently returns to the Czech Republic to visit family and friends and, when he retires, hopes to split his time between the United States, the Czech Republic, and Mexico where he owns a villa. Today, Tomas lives in Vienna, Virginia.
“He had a lot of friends still in the town who knew who he was and what he did. So they came to him from time to time and said ‘Hey Tomas’ – his name was Tomas too by coincidence – ‘Can you fix my watch?’ or ‘My ring broke, can you fix it for my wife?’ And he did. And mostly only as an exchange for favors. The other person says ‘Oh I have hens; here is a dozen eggs’ or something like that. Money in many cases didn’t even exchange hands. However, and this is the bad part of Czechs, somebody turned him into the secret police. So during one of his night shifts in the wood factory, they came. They took him inside the hall, they turned on the circular saw, and they cut his fingers. He brought those home in the bloody napkin – the ends of the fingers from his right hand – and from that time, I could never ever become a member of the Communist Party, and that’s why I have a lot of resentment against the regime and everything there. Because it was to me something so brutal, so inhuman. I don’t know a lot of circumstances around it because I was a little boy, but I never will erase from my memory for the rest of my life, the totally bloody napkin, soaked with the blood and there were the three ends of his fingers. He tried to I guess take them to the hospital if they could sew it back, but they couldn’t because I guess it was too much delay. And this piece of the memory, it is too strong to forget about.”
“My father was the leader of a tourist club [turistický klub], I believe for 50 years, consistently, and along with that, I have a lot of great memories of traveling around the country. This club had been very active. They had built a relationship with a big factory in the town which provides electrical parts for automobiles, and they had a bus which was used a lot of the time during the week to take the people to different meetings or so forth, but on the weekends quite often the bus was available and the tourists somehow made the arrangements for some kind of fee to have the bus, and traveled to different parts of the country. So that’s why I spent easily every other weekend somewhere in the mountains, a lot of hiking, climbing, this kind of stuff.”
“Thankfully to my work and also to my sports – from childhood I was very heavily involved in a variety of sports, including skiing, cross-country running, and various other sports – so I had an opportunity to see a different part of the world, the lifestyle, life experiences and different ways how people lived their life. I wasn’t dependent only on the relatively small point of view living in a small town in southern Moravia.”
“I started working for a big computing center which was working with the data from a variety of different factories and organizations and returning them back. I was working as a hardware engineer so my duties were to be on standby, ready, when any part of the computer fell down. So I have to pick up there, find out what’s wrong, fix it, then the people who operate the computer continuously could process the data. But as I mentioned, this type of work didn’t really [appeal to] me very much. I am more of an action person, and those waiting periods, when I had to literally sit in the office and wait ‘til something goes bad was not, in my mind, very productive.”
“After my first trip to Holland, when I returned back, the people from the Communist Party approached me in the company, and they offered me a membership in the Communist Party, which I kindly refused. I tried to be diplomatic back then, so I said ‘It’s a big honor for me, but a big responsibility. I have to think about it,’ and so on and so forth. So I tried to procrastinate; however, it didn’t work very well. Another trip to Holland came quickly, and another, and they approached me again and I turned it down. I sort of refused. I said ‘I love to be and perform as an electrical engineer, I love the technical science, but I would prefer to stay aside from any kind of political activity.’ So for that reason I didn’t join it. So then a friend of mine who had been a member of the Communist Party – he mentioned to me that during the meeting, which they have on their own time, was mentioned that my next trip may not be west, but east. As little I knew at the time, I thought this was kind of a fair warning, and anywhere in the world I would be much better off than perhaps in the Gulag islands or anything like that. I don’t know if the situation would go that far eventually, but who knows today. It could, because there had been many people who disappeared. So I started to plan my escape or runaway from Czechoslovakia. On my very last trip to Holland, I had been able to carry with me my university diploma and a few other documentations, birth certificates and stuff, and I sent that to the friend of a friend in Germany with a note that I will pick it up sometime later.”
“I was not sure what responsibilities the tour guide had from the bus. If he perhaps will try to hold me, maybe even under gunpoint, I had no idea. So when the people got out of the bus and were picking up luggage, I used that as an opportunity when it was kind of chaos created, and it was late at night, so when I ran behind the corner during the darkness I thought perhaps I wouldn’t be followed or I wouldn’t be noticed. So I separated myself with my daughter from the group rather quickly, literally running away. Then I found that I was not followed by anyone, so the rest of the night I was just walking. But that short moment to getting from the place where we were getting out of the bus at some hotel, I literally ran away.”
“I found a home here. I am very thankful that even through some struggles I had a very warm welcome and help from Americans. So I find my home here, and I have to say sometimes I do have kind of mixed feelings because whenever I go there, of course I still have tons of friends there. It is very nice; I have to say, every time I am there for two or three weeks, I become a little bit homesick and I gladly return back here where I feel I am home.”
In June 1987, Michal and his then-girlfriend Zuzana bought a trip to Yugoslavia which included a one-day boat ride to Venice, Italy. In anticipation of this event, Michal smuggled some foreign currency and documents in his luggage. They successfully made it to Venice with their passports and claimed asylum and were sent to a refugee camp near Rome. Michal says the conditions in the camp were ‘awful’ and the pair decided to leave. They took the train to Austria (but crossed the border on foot as they did not have permission to enter the country) where they were sent to Traiskirchen refugee camp. After a few days there, they moved to a guesthouse where they lived for 15 months with other refugees.
In September 1988, Michal and Zuzana traveled to the United States. They were sponsored by a church group in Raleigh, North Carolina, who helped them secure an apartment and a car. After a few months, Michal found a job as a draftsman at an engineering company. He took English language lessons and completed a professional degree in civil engineering from a local college. After five years, Michal and Zuzana moved to Wilmington where they stayed for another five years. They had a daughter and moved to Detroit. Michal worked at an engineering firm for a few years and, in 2005, moved to the Chicago area. Today he enjoys attending and photographing events put on by the Czech Consulate in Chicago. He received his American citizenship in 1995 and calls America ‘my homeland.’ Michal lives in Harwood Heights, Illinois.
]]>Michal Tauvinkl was born in Brno in 1953. He grew up living with his mother who worked as an accountant, his father who taught physical education and geography at a vocational school, and his older sister. In his youth, Michal enjoyed hiking with his parents and playing sports. He also loved to read. When he was nine years old, Michal and his family visited relatives in Vienna – a trip that Michal says had a ‘big impression’ on him. After graduating from gymnázium, Michal worked one year in construction and then enrolled at VUT (University of Technology) in Brno. He graduated with a degree in civil engineering and began working in this field.
In June 1987, Michal and his then-girlfriend Zuzana bought a trip to Yugoslavia which included a one-day boat ride to Venice, Italy. In anticipation of this event, Michal smuggled some foreign currency and documents in his luggage. They successfully made it to Venice with their passports and claimed asylum and were sent to a refugee camp near Rome. Michal says the conditions in the camp were ‘awful’ and the pair decided to leave. They took the train to Austria (but crossed the border on foot as they did not have permission to enter the country) where they were sent to Traiskirchen refugee camp. After a few days there, they moved to a guesthouse where they lived for 15 months with other refugees.
In September 1988, Michal and Zuzana traveled to the United States. They were sponsored by a church group in Raleigh, North Carolina, who helped them secure an apartment and a car. After a few months, Michal found a job as a draftsman at an engineering company. He took English language lessons and completed a professional degree in civil engineering from a local college. After five years, Michal and Zuzana moved to Wilmington where they stayed for another five years. They had a daughter and moved to Detroit. Michal worked at an engineering firm for a few years and, in 2005, moved to the Chicago area. Today he enjoys attending and photographing events put on by the Czech Consulate in Chicago. He received his American citizenship in 1995 and calls America ‘my homeland.’ Michal lives in Harwood Heights, Illinois.
“Sport – that was really my hobby. Skiing, and later on I did windsurfing. I built by myself the whole board, so we were doing some windsurfing on the lakes. Other than that, sport was the big escape for people. Camping, going out to the forest, because everybody was leaving the city and going to – they called it a chalupa [cottage]– and going to villages and escaping from the city.”
“In 1962 we went to Vienna and I was nine years old, and when you crossed the border – everything in Czechoslovakia was kind of drab, gray and brown – we went to Austria and it was like a different world. The gas stations with the colorful flags and colors everywhere and new cars. I think that left a huge impression on me. [I thought] ‘I want to live here,’ you know? And Coca-Cola and fries! Eating fries was like ‘Wow.’ It was amazing. That definitely had a big impression on me. It was just once. The funny thing was we had really little pocket money, so we were traveling in Austria by hitchhiking on the highway. It was pretty cool. My dad, he spoke German fluently, because he was born there. Some people let us sleep in their houses. It was great. It was so special.”
“It was amazing. Suddenly you can read. There were new magazines, every month, coming out; new information. People were talking on the radio and on TV about what happened in the ‘50s in the Czech Republic, when they executed any opposition and [had] the show trials. I was 15 years old, but it had a great impression on me; I just hated communists. Then the Russians came in August, and it took like two years to break everybody, and that’s my disappointment with the Czech nation, that we gave up way too easily I think. I’m not saying that we should fight, because we didn’t have a chance, but what happened was people renounced their opinion really quickly. And I think it was much worse in the ‘70s maybe than in the ‘50s, although there were no executions or anything like that. But it was like the dark ages, culturally and morally. Yeah, I think the ‘70s was a really bad time, and when we saw the movie about Milos Forman [What doesn’t kill you…], he was talking about it and he said ‘There was no hope; it will be there forever.’ But 1968 was just amazing. It was so refreshing and everything.”
“We boarded the ship to Venice and we had a big luggage – for a one-day trip to Venice! And everyone was looking at us and, honestly, I was scared. I was really scared. Because you don’t know what to expect, you are leaving everything behind you, and so I didn’t enjoy this sailing across the sea too much. We got to Venice and they said ‘You from Czechoslovakia, there’s one gate and everybody else goes to the other gate,’ and they don’t even open the [other] passports, like Dutch and German; they just went through. And I felt like ‘That’s the reason I have to leave’ because it was so humiliating. I felt justification, like ‘I have to leave this.’ But the Italians told me, ‘You don’t need, for a one-day trip, this huge luggage, so put it back on the ship.’ Another thing, they left our passports on the ship. So I said ‘Ok’ and I took the bag with money and laminated [documents] inside and I went to the toilet, and I had a little pocket knife and I was ripping this bag to get the money and stuff out. I was so scared, but I got it out.
“So we went to Venice and we asked for asylum, and they said ‘No, don’t do it now. Come back when you are coming back and then you can do it.’ So we are wandering across Venice and we went to St. Mark’s Piazza and there were all these tourists having a great time, and we were kind of desperate. So we went back, but we didn’t have our passports, so one Italian guy offered to go to the ship to pick up the passports and some luggage, but he brought the luggage of some other person, so it was a mess; it was complicated. And after that, the Italians took us to the police station, they did a short interview with us, and they gave us tickets to Latina, which was a refugee camp close to Rome.”
“Our sponsors were a group of people from the United Methodist Church in North Carolina, in Raleigh, and it was just a group of fantastic people. Me and Zuzana, my ex, we are not religious people. I wouldn’t say we are atheist; I believe in something spiritual, but I am not necessarily Catholic or Baptist. But these people, they saw one paper with a really bad photo of us, and they decided ‘We want to sponsor these people.’ When we got to the airport, one of them took us to his home; we stayed there for two days; they found an apartment for us. They paid for an apartment for us for six months, they paid for our insurance, they gave us a car, they provided furniture for our whole apartment. Everything. The furniture, every piece was different, but who cares? And when we told this to our friends and relatives in Czechoslovakia, they couldn’t believe it. They said ‘What do you they want for it?’ I said ‘Nothing. They want to help.’”
“I know people that went back right away, but I never had any intention to go back because I was so impressed with Americans, with their hospitality, and how they accepted us. That’s the major difference, I feel. And I’ve had big arguments with Czech people about like ‘Be proud that you are Czech,’ and I said ‘You know what, this is my homeland.’ I was treated so well here and when I go back I just don’t feel it. So no, I never had any desire to go back.”
Matt grew up in a suburb of Bratislava and, of the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, he remembers Soviet tanks stationed across the street from his family’s apartment building. He attended a school that offered German language classes, and Matt says that these language skills introduced him to Western culture and piqued his interest in the idea of eventually leaving Czechoslovakia. He says he was also exposed to Western life when he worked at international trade shows (showcasing construction equipment) in Bratislava as a translator and assistant. Matt studied engineering at technical university in Bratislava, but in 1983, one year before graduating, he left the country when he was able to take a trip to Italy. Matt stayed in Rome for six months working with refugees, and then received immigration papers for Canada, where an uncle who had left Czechoslovakia in 1968 lived.
Matt finished his engineering degree at Concordia University in Montreal, and was subsequently hired at SPAR Aerospace; he worked there for ten years. Matt married his wife Gaby in 1991, and they have five children together. He and his family have lived all over the world, including Nigeria, Southern California, and Budapest. In 2003, the Carnogurskys lived in Plavecký štvrtok, a town outside Bratislava, for six months. Matt says this was a wonderful experience for his children and allowed them to spend time with their grandparents. In 2009, the family moved to Northern Virginia where they currently live. They also recently expanded their family by adopting three children from Haiti in early 2010. Matt says that even though he has been in so many cultures and environments, he considers himself American and is happy to be here.
]]>Matt Carnogursky was born in Bratislava in 1960. His mother Isabella had a job as a chemical engineer and his father Ivan was a mechanical engineer working for a construction company. After the fall of communism, Ivan served in the Slovak parliament and held jobs concerning the business and economic development of the country. Matt’s uncle, Ján Čarnogurský, was a fairly well-known lawyer and political dissident who held the post of Prime Minister of Slovakia from 1991 to 1992.
Matt grew up in a suburb of Bratislava and, of the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, he remembers Soviet tanks stationed across the street from his family’s apartment building. He attended a school that offered German language classes, and Matt says that these language skills introduced him to Western culture and piqued his interest in the idea of eventually leaving Czechoslovakia. He says he was also exposed to Western life when he worked at international trade shows (showcasing construction equipment) in Bratislava as a translator and assistant. Matt studied engineering at technical university in Bratislava, but in 1983, one year before graduating, he left the country when he was able to take a trip to Italy. Matt stayed in Rome for six months working with refugees, and then received immigration papers for Canada, where an uncle who had left Czechoslovakia in 1968 lived.
Matt finished his engineering degree at Concordia University in Montreal, and was subsequently hired at SPAR Aerospace; he worked there for ten years. Matt married his wife Gaby in 1991, and they have five children together. He and his family have lived all over the world, including Nigeria, Southern California, and Budapest. In 2003, the Carnogurskys lived in Plavecký štvrtok, a town outside Bratislava, for six months. Matt says this was a wonderful experience for his children and allowed them to spend time with their grandparents. In 2009, the family moved to Northern Virginia where they currently live. They also recently expanded their family by adopting three children from Haiti in early 2010. Matt says that even though he has been in so many cultures and environments, he considers himself American and is happy to be here.
“I was growing up in a suburb of Bratislava. Pretty interesting, because back then people had to struggle to get a place to live. My dad was working for a construction company, and somehow managed to get them to build him or to allocate him a three-room apartment. It’s not the same as a three-bedroom apartment, it’s three rooms, but it was great because it was on the outskirts of Bratislava. We had lots of fun there by the Danube. When the Russians invaded the country in 1968, there were tanks around our house. There were some wheat fields just across the street, so they dug themselves in, they made some trenches. Unfortunately the wheat field never came back after that so it turned into a garbage dump. Eventually my dad built a house at the other end of the town, so we moved there.”
“My parents were not from the politically favored class. Quite the opposite. So that limited them essentially to jobs as engineers. Engineers were always needed even though you may not have been politically favored, but the country always was willing to tolerate engineers. Of course, you couldn’t say much or do much, but at least you had a chance to get the education and practice that job. So, that was fair enough, so essentially everybody in my family is engineers – my mom was a chemical engineer, my dad was a mechanical engineer, my older brother graduated in engineering, and I got my engineering degree and my younger brother.”
“My parents put us – the two of us, the older two – in a school that taught German, that had some German classes. It was kind of tolerated. The German language was one of the de facto street languages in Bratislava, at least from previous years. So there were a lot of native German speakers in Bratislava in the ‘60s and ‘70s when I went to school. And through this education, it really opened a door. Through the Austrian radio, through the Austrian television which was across the border which broadcast all the way to Bratislava, we could receive coverage, so I listened to Austrian radio all the time and the TV, that was maybe not so good, but still. So we got enough exposure to what then we thought was Western culture – nowadays you look at Austria where it’s a socialist country, but still – a lot more western than Czechoslovakia was at the time.”
“Then when I was a teenager, my dad had opportunities to get me jobs at international trade shows in Slovakia, working for Western companies who came there to exhibit their products, because there was some foreign trade between the West and communist countries. So these companies came to Czechoslovakia, they had a booth, they needed somebody who can translate, who can speak the language and help them out.”
“When I was 23, in 1983 – it was one year from graduating from technical university in Bratislava – I got myself a two week trip to Italy through a travel agency, which, for people living in Czechoslovakia, these things were fundamentally possible. Even though they were expensive, very limited, very bare bones and you couldn’t get them too often, but they were fundamentally possible. If you were an East German, then this would be completely off limits to you, but different countries there had different levels of freedom, different degrees of freedom for citizens. The former Yugoslavia were pretty liberal, Hungary was fairly liberal in terms of movement, East Germany was completely restricted, and Czechoslovakia was somewhere in between. So I took this two week trip to Italy and just never returned. I spent six months in Italy living in Rome with a Catholic priest attached to a Slovak bishop who was there, was part of the Vatican. Essentially their mission was to help refugees – at that time there was a lot of refugees in the refugee camp south of Rome – so I was helping them out visiting the refugees. So I spent six months there until I got my immigration papers to Canada.”
“First time we went there was literally a few weeks after the revolution, and I could not even believe when my dad said ‘Come back, come and visit. It’s no problem’ because when I had defected it was some kind of criminal offense by the laws of Czechoslovakia of that time, which eventually got deleted. [I said] ‘Technically the police are looking for me there, so it would be especially kind of stupid to go there, right?’ ‘No, don’t worry. It’s completely different, nobody cares. It’s completely free, everything changed.’ It was really, really hard to believe.”
“The lasting memory of that trip – apart from the fact that everything was dirt cheap because the dollar had such great buying power at that time. But the lasting memory of that trip was that Slovaks were so relaxed, and Czechs for that matter too. But people in that country were just so relaxed, so at ease. Now, I must say, that was then, and I’ve been to Slovakia several times since, and this easiness more or less is gone. I don’t see it there anymore. No doubt, it’s far, far better than it was under communism, far, far better, no doubt. But I’m just saying that there was that one period where people were just so happy, so helpful, so friendly to each other.”
Joe Gazdik was born in the spa town of Trenčianske Teplice, in western Slovakia, in March 1940. His family had a small farm, which he and his brother helped look after. To make ends meet after WWII, Joe’s father worked on both the family farm and the land belonging to the spa itself. Joe went to school in Nové Mesto nad Váhom and, as a keen sportsman, gained a place at Charles University’s Faculty of Physical Education in Prague upon graduation. He studied there for one month until his father died and, Joe says, money ran out. In 1961, Joe entered the Czechoslovak Army and was sent to the officers’ academy in Nitra. He left the army in 1963 and began to study technology and machine maintenance at the Stredná priemyselná škola in Dubnica nad Váhom; during this time he also worked in a local factory. Joe says it was when he was denied promotion at this plant (called Strojárske a metalurgické závody Dubnica) that he decided to leave Czechoslovakia.
He did so with two of his friends in August 1969 in the course of an organized coach tour to East Germany and Denmark. In Copenhagen, the trio went to the Danish police with their passports and said they did not want to return home. Joe subsequently spent 21 months in Denmark, working at the port in Copenhagen, before moving to Munich, Germany, and then the United States. He was sponsored to come to the United States by the International Rescue Committee in 1971. Joe first lived in Annandale, Virginia, before settling in Alexandria and then Arlington, where he lives to this day. He started working in construction in the Washington, D.C. area before securing a job with ABC News, where he worked as a building and maintenance technician for 21 years. He retired at the end of 2001. He is married to Maria Amparo Gazdik and has two daughters, Leyla Margareta and Lucy Ann.
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Joe Gazdik was born in the spa town of Trenčianske Teplice, in western Slovakia, in March 1940. His family had a small farm, which he and his brother helped look after. To make ends meet after WWII, Joe’s father worked on both the family farm and the land belonging to the spa itself. Joe went to school in Nové Mesto nad Váhom and, as a keen sportsman, gained a place at Charles University’s Faculty of Physical Education in Prague upon graduation. He studied there for one month until his father died and, Joe says, money ran out. In 1961, Joe entered the Czechoslovak Army and was sent to the officers’ academy in Nitra. He left the army in 1963 and began to study technology and machine maintenance at the Stredná priemyselná škola in Dubnica nad Váhom; during this time he also worked in a local factory. Joe says it was when he was denied promotion at this plant (called Strojárske a metalurgické závody Dubnica) that he decided to leave Czechoslovakia.
He did so with two of his friends in August 1969 in the course of an organized coach tour to East Germany and Denmark. In Copenhagen, the trio went to the Danish police with their passports and said they did not want to return home. Joe subsequently spent 21 months in Denmark, working at the port in Copenhagen, before moving to Munich, Germany, and then the United States. He was sponsored to come to the United States by the International Rescue Committee in 1971. Joe first lived in Annandale, Virginia, before settling in Alexandria and then Arlington, where he lives to this day. He started working in construction in the Washington, D.C. area before securing a job with ABC News, where he worked as a building and maintenance technician for 21 years. He retired at the end of 2001. He is married to Maria Amparo Gazdik and has two daughters, Leyla Margareta and Lucy Ann.
“Everybody was almost poor, because people didn’t have too many things after the War – everything was destroyed. I remember I didn’t have shoes; I couldn’t go out and play because we didn’t have shoes for a few months, because it was not available to buy anything. At the end of 1946, the supplies started to come to the people, because the factory and everything was destroyed, and people didn’t have, you know, too much money to buy things and it was very hard. Just after I started to go to school, I remember, it was much better everything.”
“We were very careful not to say one word to anybody in the group, because we knew that in the group they have some informer. Exactly what happened was, we were in Warnemuende in Germany, which is in the North Sea region, you know, which is like a recreation area, and the German secret police came – the Stasi – and they took one girl away from us. The told her, ‘Take your suitcase and come with us immediately.’ They showed this ID to our leader who was with the group and said ‘We are police from DDR Germany and this girl must go back with us to Czechoslovakia immediately.’ And the girl was crying, unbelievable, you know, she was so sorry. Just two guys come and they say, right away ‘You must go with us.’
“Her idea probably was if she goes to Denmark she will stay over there, that is my thinking, you know. Just they took her away, we didn’t say anything, we always said ‘Oh, we are coming back, I must finish my house’ (because I was remodeling,) ‘We must do this when we come back.’ You know, we had a good time and we were friendly with everybody in the group, just we never ever said something bad about the government or ‘we will not come back’ or something. We always looked to the future back in Czechoslovakia, that ‘we will do this and come back and do that…’”
“You see, you went to the police in Denmark, and we said ‘We don’t want to go back.’ And they said ‘Ok, give us your passport.’ We must give them our passport, a young police officer in civilian clothes said ‘Come with me.’ We went to his car, we went to the hotel where we stayed and he said to the doorman ‘These guys go with me.’ He said ‘Let them go into the room, pick up their things and they go with me.’ And the doorman said ‘Well, it’s a police officer,’ you know, he didn’t say anything. We picked up our things, we went to his car, and he takes us to the penzion. It was not like a camp or something, it was a pension, a nice pension, in Copenhagen, and it was full of refugees – Czechs, Slovaks and Polaks.”
“I sent my mum, I tried to send her some money in the letters, and all the time, I sent the letters registered, you know, [to be picked up] in the post office. And what really bothered me was that the director of the post office told my mother ‘Open the letter here.’ And mother opened the letter, there was money in it, and he said ‘I give you one week to go into the bank and exchange this money the legal way.’ Because at this time there were bony and my mum could sell these dollars to somebody and some people liked to buy bony [with this foreign currency], because they liked to buy cars or go to Tuzex – at this time there was Tuzex [a shop where luxury goods could be bought for foreign currency] and all kinds of things. Just no, they told my mother something that was not right, because you have the law, you have secrecy, no? You’re supposed to have, in your letters, secrecy. And they said ‘Forget it, open it, right now!’”
“I was leaving the shipyard in Copenhagen and they sent me to this superintendent, because he must sign the paper for me to release me, and he asked me, he said ‘I heard that you are going to America.’ I said ‘Well, I would like to go.’ And he said to me ‘I lived in America for 15 years,’ he said, ‘I was working over there.’ He said ‘America is hard, just if you make it, you will be happy.’ He said ‘If you don’t make it, come here and see me and I will take you back.’ He told me that. And I always remembered that, him saying ‘America is hard, just if you make it, you will be happy.’ Thanks god, I was working hard, you know, working in construction in this country – it is not easy. I was working, I remember, I was working for this company for six years – it was George Hyman, it is now called something different – they changed it, now it is Clark Company. We were building this new Senate office building, it was like a big hole, three floors down, and the Washington temperature was 102 degrees. Back in the hole it was maybe 120 degrees! It was not easy, it was hard – and thanks god I made it. I was working most of the time inside construction, finishing everything, this kind of thing, you know, not outside. Just that time we were building that Senate office building I was working outside, because I didn’t want to leave the company, I wanted to stay with the company. And, it was not easy.”
After her stepfather’s death in 1979, Daniela and her mother made plans to leave the country. In July 1980, they joined a tour traveling to Germany, Italy and Austria, and left the group on the first night of the tour. Claiming asylum, Daniela and her mother had to wait to receive work permits before they could build their new life. Daniela’s mother eventually received her credentials and worked as a nurse for 15 years (today she continues to live in Germany). Because of her language skills, Daniela worked as an interpreter. At a trade show in Frankfurt, she met her future husband, Patrick Mahoney, who lived in Portland, Oregon. He invited Daniela to the United States and, in 1982, she traveled to Portland. The couple married the following year.
Since moving to the United States, Daniela has received a bachelor’s degree in marketing and a master’s degree in social work from Portland State University. Today she works as a case manager for the state of Oregon. Daniela has also had a successful career as a folk artist. She learned traditional egg decorating from her grandmother and, since arriving in the United States, has turned her hobby into a business, selling decorated eggs, giving lectures, creating children’s coloring and activity books, and promoting traditional folk crafts and culture. Daniela’s two children are also skilled egg decorators. Daniela has returned to the Czech Republic three times, most recently to research her family history and genealogy. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband Patrick.
]]>Daniela Mahoney was born in Prague in 1956. Her parents lived in Karlovy Vary at the time and Daniela spent much of her time with her grandparents in Prague. When her parents divorced, Daniela’s mother moved back to Prague where she worked as a nurse. Daniela says that she became interested in languages at a young age and enjoyed learning Russian and German in school. After finding out from her father that he spoke French, she began taking French lessons at a cultural center. Daniela studied international affairs and business; however, her plans to build a career in governmental foreign services were derailed as several of her aunts and uncles left Czechoslovakia for Switzerland. She found a job as a receptionist at a hotel in Prague.
After her stepfather’s death in 1979, Daniela and her mother made plans to leave the country. In July 1980, they joined a tour traveling to Germany, Italy and Austria, and left the group on the first night of the tour. Claiming asylum, Daniela and her mother had to wait to receive work permits before they could build their new life. Daniela’s mother eventually received her credentials and worked as a nurse for 15 years (today she continues to live in Germany). Because of her language skills, Daniela worked as an interpreter. At a trade show in Frankfurt, she met her future husband, Patrick Mahoney, who lived in Portland, Oregon. He invited Daniela to the United States and, in 1982, she traveled to Portland. The couple married the following year.
Since moving to the United States, Daniela has received a bachelor’s degree in marketing and a master’s degree in social work from Portland State University. Today she works as a case manager for the state of Oregon. Daniela has also had a successful career as a folk artist. She learned traditional egg decorating from her grandmother and, since arriving in the United States, has turned her hobby into a business, selling decorated eggs, giving lectures, creating children’s coloring and activity books, and promoting traditional folk crafts and culture. Daniela’s two children are also skilled egg decorators. Daniela has returned to the Czech Republic three times, most recently to research her family history and genealogy. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband Patrick.
“My grandma was from southern Moravia and she had several sisters, and one of the sisters became a maid for wealthy people who lived in Prague. There were usually women who came to the villages to recruit young, unmarried women to come to Prague to work for the wealthy people, and typically the young women would work for them for a few years and then they would get married and then they would find another woman to work for them. And so one of Grandma’s sisters got a job like that and then she brought several sisters to Prague and my grandma was one of the sisters. Typically the girls would be taking care of the children or they would work in the kitchen or they would clean the house. My grandma became involved in cooking, and she was a very good cook and she knew how to prepare all these fancy meals because in the old days people would organize large parties in their homes and everything was made in that home by the servants and so my grandma was one of those servants. My grandfather came from a farming family; he was the musician and he did amateur music, but he actually worked for the post office in the old days, so he had a full-time job. The way I understand it is that my grandma and my grandfather had been introduced to each other by someone, so it was like a blind date, and so this is how they got together in Prague, because they both worked there.”
“Grandma always would take me to Moravia for vacations because her sisters lived there, and we would spend the whole summer in the countryside and I have really fond memories from those times that I shared also with my daughter and my son, always referring to Moravia. I had really interesting memories because my grandma’s sisters were living in the farming communities and, certainly, the lifestyle there was very different than in Prague, and they always thought I was very skinny and they had to feed me because I am too skinny. So I recall that we would get up as children and my grandma’s sister would ask ‘What do you want for lunch? Do you want chicken or a rabbit?’ and she would just go and she would catch the chicken and actually prepare it for lunch, and so lunch preparation took like four hours and, of course, we would never do anything like that in Prague, so it was quite a cultural shock for me.”
“Ever since I was school age, my grandma encouraged me to communicate with my father in Karlovy Vary, so I found out that he spoke fluent French and he spent the time during the War in, actually, in France, and so I felt inspired to study French. It was not available in our school that I went to – I was already 11 or 12 when I decided to study French – and so I remember that Grandma would take me to a special cultural center where they would teach the French language, and we had to walk through a dark street and there was a cemetery on the side, and so I remember that Grandma would take me every Wednesday night. She would walk with me around the cemetery and she would take me to the cultural center and sit there and wait so that I could finish studying and take these classes. So as a child, I guess I was a small linguist and so I was very proficient by the time I was a teenager. I was very proficient in German and French and Russian languages.”
“We were a crafty family so I knew how to crochet and knit, and I remember that we had shortages of certain materials so when we wanted to buy clothes there was not really a big choice, so people would sew their own clothes; they would knit and crochet. I remember this unique experience that people would actually go to the stores and buy socks. They were woolen socks and you would actually take the socks apart and you would recycle the yarn, and so they would knit or crochet a sweater, and then, when I would grow, they would take the sweater apart and add more yarn, but they were still using these socks. I cannot actually explain it to anyone, but people who were born in the Czech Republic or grew up there would probably remember those times. I remember also that we would use old clothing that we would get from relatives from the United States. They would send us these packages, because my grandfather’s brothers and sisters all lived in the United States. So they would send this large clothing to us and we would actually take the clothing and put patterns over it, and I remember having clothing from those garments. Because of all these experiences, I actually became very resourceful and creative.”
“I had some contacts in Germany so we decided to sign up for a tour and, my mother and I, we would go on a tour and then we would essentially leave the tour, and so we went on a tour to Munich. It was a tour that went to Germany, Italy and Austria. It began in Germany and ended in Austria, and we actually chose to separate ourselves from the group already in Germany, on the first night of the journey. So we prepared for this escape for one year for sure – it was slightly more than that – so we sold most of our possessions and converted the money into Western currency and left. We left, literally, with a suitcase full of old clothes that we had to leave behind [with the tour] and my mother had a plastic bag and I had another plastic bag and that’s what we left with. But we had some friends who were able to travel across the border from the Czech Republic to Germany, and they were able to bring our documents and some valuables, but very little. So we had left not only our belongings, but all the memorabilia that had sentimental value – we had to leave all of it there.”
“For the first time in my life I was very relaxed. I didn’t have to be stressed out about what am I going to do, where am I going to work, how I am going to pay my rent. In the Czech Republic, as well as in Germany, there was always a fear. We always lived in fear of somebody or something. It is very difficult to disassociate yourself from the fear. There are certain fears that you have learned to somehow keep in your mind at all times – the alertness. So I think it’s some kind of a trauma actually, but that’s one issue that will never go away. So I’m always fearful of something, and I have learned to manage those fears but, still, there are times when I am afraid.”
“I love the Czech Republic. I absolutely loved visiting the Czech Republic; I felt like Alice in Wonderland. It was a beautiful, wonderful experience and I love the country and I love the people. I cannot see myself there anymore as a permanent resident. I remember coming back to Portland, and I was holding my passport in my hand, and all of the sudden this weird feeling came over me: ‘I am home.’ That still is sad; this is a very sad realization, where you basically have an identity problem, like ‘Who am I?’ and I think that is a problem that will never be resolved. But, I just am who I am. I’m a U.S. citizen; I work in the United States; I went to school here; I have a job here; my entire life is here. Of course, I could retire and then live with my retirement in the Czech Republic, but I have so many friends here and so many people I know and so many things I want to do here. So I think I can just go back as a visitor and I can embrace those opportunities but, sadly to say, this is my home, the United States.”